I wouldn’t trust a pilot to take over from the computer during a crisis if they’ve barely done any real flying in the past few years. Humans need practice to become and remain skilled. I’m worried about the effect of such systems on pilot skill.
This is a big issue for self-flying aircraft. Keeping the aircraft stable requires reliable altitude, airspeed, and orientation data. If you have that, you can stay in the air. AF 447 lost airspeed data, the flight control system dropped to a lower level, and gave up stall protection. It couldn't tell if the aircraft was stalling. That was enough to confuse the pilots so badly that they crashed a working airplane with plenty of speed, power, and altitude into the ocean.
A self-flying aircraft has the same problem, only worse. Without that info, it cannot stay in the air. There are fighters that need so much active stabilization that if you lose air data, you have to eject. Self-flying aircraft thus need really, really reliable air data sensors, and lots of them.
Getting airspeed from GPS has been suggested. There's one bizjet which does this. It can't be flown in areas where GPS jamming is in progress. Over-dependence on GPS is a problem.
All that is just to be able to fly straight and level. That's flight control. Navigation and landing are separate problems.
All this and the code needs to be written correctly especially with regards to edge cases. Thousands of planes have been flying around the world for several decades now and we still see unique accidents or slip-ups that have never occurred before.
Think of all the edge cases that need to be accounted for with all the different variables out there from weather to people misbehaving on the plane. It's only going to take one freak accident to have people not want to board a self-flying craft ever again.
The only practical way to mitigate this that i can think of is more emphasis on regular simulator training. It may ultimately undercut the financial benefits of full time autopilot if pilots have to spend a larger fraction of their time on the clock in simulators, plus more sims would have to be built and operated.
The jet crashed because lightning hit it, the plane did not have an feature to drop fuel and landed over max landing weight and there are other reasons.
Metro is not the most reliable source of information.
(sport pilot here) Can you explain what are you thinking about? I had a few cases of unexpected problems while flying, simulators in my case would not help at all, but it may be different for large planes with huge inertia vs my larger-than-a-kite extremely sensible 2-seater.
